An Accidental Sportswriter

by Robert Lipsyte

  Despite that, he told me, had his own children wanted to use steroids in pursuit of their athletic careers, he would have helped them. Apparently, either they didn’t want to or they listened to his second wife, Pat Connolly, a three-time Olympian, who forbade it. (Harold died at seventy-nine, in 2010, after falling off his exercise bike. We had spoken a few months earlier, and he said he was in great shape and didn’t even need “old guy” testosterone.)

  Knowing about anabolic-androgenic steroids, which mimic the effects of natural testosterone, even writing about them, is not the same as mounting an investigation, blowing the whistle, pointing fingers at ripped bodies. Count me among the sportswriters who didn’t go after the juicers. All that twenty-first-century media rage over ’roid rage felt like the revenge of the nerds. Sports scribes were so ashamed of having blown the only truly big story of their generation that they turned viciously on their former heroes. It was the mirror image of the story about the weapons of mass destruction in Iraq that weren’t there. The front-page bigfeet blew that one. The steroids were right in front of the sports scribes, but they were in denial—and in the tank.

  Despite the rash of mea culpas, the media failure on the story of steroid use in baseball was inexcusable, because honest stories were being written—and ignored. In the 1980s, Thomas Boswell of the Washington Post, among others, was already pointing fingers at the juicers. In 1995, Bob Nightengale, then with the Los Angeles Times, quoted general managers as saying that steroids were becoming part of the game. In 1998, Steve Wilstein of the Associated Press wrote about observing a bottle of androstenedione in slugger Mark McGwire’s locker. He was assailed by many of his colleagues as a snoop.

  In 1999, Tom Scocca wrote in the Baltimore City Paper that “McGwire is what people in the bodybuilding business refer to, accurately, as a ‘freak.’ He is bloated and deformed beyond normal human dimensions. His condition is usually ascribed to strength training—as if some free-weight routine could make his cheek muscles swell up like a pair of grapefruits. If he is not abusing steroids, then he is suffering from a pathological endocrine condition.”

  In 2002, Ken Caminiti, the National League’s Most Valuable Player in 1996, admitted he had regularly used steroids. He died two years later. In Editor & Publisher, Joe Strupp wrote, “But instead of sparking a wave of follow-up articles or investigations to ferret out the details of steroid use in baseball—who was using it, where it came from, what it did to the body—sportswriters essentially left the story alone.”

  They left it alone not out of laziness or stupidity but rather in the sweet moral corruption of love. Perhaps even more than entertainment and political writers, perhaps even more than hard-core fans, sportswriters adore the events themselves and the heady access. Love wants to be blind. As Murray Chass, then of the New York Times, told Editor & Publisher, “I’m not sure that you want to spend every day being suspicious of someone. It might be the journalistic thing to do. But it is not fun.”

  Fun was the home run–happy summer of 1998. Remember the moment when McGwire, that St. Louis slugger with the Popeye forearms, androed us out of a national depression over Bill’s stain on Monica’s blue dress? (Ah, for the dreamy days when McGwire, with Sammy Sosa at his heels, was breaking Yankee Roger Maris’s record of 61 homers and thus refurbishing the legend of the mighty Babe.)

  Of course, Barry Bonds and Alex Rodriguez did not find that summer fun at all. Barry sulked; he was a far better ballplayer than McGwire, yet was being eclipsed by that wide white hormone container. It must have crossed his mind then that he’d better get some of that stuff Mark was using.

  Roger Clemens, then thirty-five and on the downside of a fine pitching career, was wondering how he could survive against this new crew of monster hitters. He found a strength coach who somehow was able to help make him a monster, too. And A-Rod, that diva, was having a career season and nobody even noticed. He had used PEDs before. Maybe it was time to try them again.

  I feel a certain empathy here, old guys doing whatever was necessary to hang on, extend their careers, satisfy teammates, owners, and fans. Consider a variation on using performance-enhancing drugs, the case of Dr. George Sheehan, who, while dying from prostate cancer at age seventy-four, manipulated his dosage of a hormone that blocked testosterone so he could run faster in races. He was abusing, too, right?

  Sheehan had been a guru of the fitness boom of the 1970s and ’80s, his practical advice on running refined and thickened with anecdotes from millions of his own footsteps and quotes from the experiential philosophers, poured into newspaper and magazine columns and into seven books including the best-selling Running and Being.

  We had first met a few hours before the 1968 Boston Marathon. I was trolling for a column among the 890 entrants waiting for their prerace physical in a Hopkinton high school gym. I’m not sure whether I discovered him—those glittering eyes in a pale, hawkish face—or he spotted my notebook. He became a recurring character of mine for the next thirty-five years simply by telling me that morning that he regarded the race as a Greek tragedy. “There is hubris, and there is nemesis. The beginning of the course is downhill, and everyone is charged up. They run too fast, and their pride destroys them. By the time they reach the Newton Hills, they’re walking.”

  My kind of subject. But for all his rhetoric, he was down to earth. When he heard I jogged in my old army boots like the boxers I covered, he suggested that, based on my build, I might do well to concentrate on swimming and cycling. If I did decide to keep jogging, I should wear old Hush Puppies for starters instead of expensive running shoes and drink lots of water, never soda or the new sports drinks.

  I enjoyed talking to him, hearing his story. The oldest of fourteen children of a Brooklyn doctor, Sheehan ran at Manhattan College but gave it up for squash and tennis when he became a cardiologist. In 1962, the forty-three-year-old father of twelve, feeling trapped in his life, snapped after getting a 2 A.M. call to the hospital and punched a wall. He broke his hand. To stay in shape while it healed, he began to run again.

  He was feeling very good about himself in 1984 when another running guru, Dr. Kenneth Cooper of Dallas, gave him the good news—he had just scored in the 99th percentile on a stress test—and the bad news—he had cancer.

  “I was very angry,” remembered Sheehan. “Everything was going my way. But I wasn’t surprised. I’m a passive type, the kind who die of cancer. And my lifestyle prevented heart attack.”

  Then he spun his diagnosis into a metaphor: “I think of dying as a blood sport, like bullfighting. The bull, of course, is death, and I am defending myself, dancing with death, creating this beautiful aesthetic. The blood sports show us that death is not defeat.”

  This was on a day of gorgeous life in the summer of 1993, four months before he died, the sun splashing off the ocean, filling the living room of Sheehan’s beachside New Jersey home, glinting off his pale blue eyes. On the road beneath the windows, joggers huffed by.

  “Certain qualities are brought out in the race,” said Sheehan, clawing through piles of books, notes, mail on the floor beside his chair. “In the contest, what the Greeks called the agon, you find out you have what it takes and you’re altered by the experience. To meet the challenge of death is now my race.”

  Prostate cancer rides to metastasis on currents of male hormone. The hypothalamic hormone he took to block his body’s production of testosterone, GnRH, performed a chemical castration. For the first time in his life his mind was clear.

  “I am the eye in the sky now,” he crowed, “and I see how ludicrous men are, acting out a script written by a gland in their bodies. It’s all testosterone. The only thing that protects us against it is good manners.”

  But that was the philosopher talking. The jock had begun tinkering with his dosage of GnRH, which might have been holding back the cancer but was surely holding back George. To run faster, he needed the juice. He cut back on GnRH while in heavy training and skipped it altogether when a race was coming
up. He was willing to whittle days off the end of his life so he could run at his best. I wish I could talk to him right now about McGwire and A-Rod and Bonds. Even about Harold and Lance. I’m sure he’d find something in Heidegger or Saint Augustine that applied. And a personal judgment. And a suggestion for what chemical they should be taking.

  While it was George who suggested I was built for bike riding, it was Lance who got me onto a bike again. (I had ridden as a kid, of course, and while in college I delivered telegrams for Western Union, which I guess makes me a former professional bike rider.)

  In July 1999, after he won the Tour de France for the first time, I ran out and bought a Specialized hybrid and began chanting “LanceArmstrong” up hills. I followed him avidly, read his superb book with Sally Jenkins, It’s Not About the Bike, and in 2001, when he asked me to moderate a Stanford University panel under the auspices of his cancer research and education foundation, I flew right out.

  It was a first for me, working for a subject, and I wasn’t quite sure of the conflict-of-interest issues. In my old monkish days I would have righteously just said no. But this was Lance and cancer. The fee I charged was a thirty-minute private interview with Lance. We got off to a shaky start when I asked about the allegations against him.

  “Drugs, there you go,” snorted Armstrong. We were sitting in a sunny hotel courtyard in Palo Alto, California. “The media, including your newspaper, loves to print all these rumors of what I’m supposed to be taking. When my tests come up negative the stories are much smaller, if you print them at all.”

  It got better. He was direct, engaged, friendly, twitchy. He was clearly the man I had expected, focused on the interview once he realized he had to do it, honest, still the the hard case who grew with psychic pain he apparently still shuts down with self-inflicted physical pain.

  His mother was seventeen when Lance was born, and his father left them when the boy was two. Armstrong dismisses him as “a nonfactor” who merely “provided the DNA.” When a Texas newspaper tracked down his biological father, Armstrong not only expressed lack of interest in finally meeting him but called the man’s expression of pride opportunistic. It was as if he were trying to abandon the old man right back.

  Lance described his stepfather, Terry Armstrong, as “a Christian who used to beat me for silly things.” Maybe that’s why he described himself as an agnostic. At seven, he was liberated by a Schwinn Mag Scrambler. “Cycling is so hard,” he says. “The suffering is so intense that it’s absolutely cleansing.”

  He was a perfect candidate for chemotherapy.

  The precancerous Lance Armstrong was known as the Texas Bull, an aggressive, disrespectful rider fueled by the rage that covered his fears. He has said he likes himself much better now. Unlike most public cancer survivors, who profess moral improvement, his claim seems to be more than a way of finding something worthwhile in bad luck.

  Though he says that cancer made him a better person, more certainly it made him a better racer. Before his months of chemo, he had been a star of one-day races. After chemo, he discovered his forte was in endurance for the long haul, which is what the twenty-three-day, 2,274-mile Tour de France is about. As is life. Without cancer, he believes, he would not have won the Tour.

  For all his calls to “Live strong” and his now-ubiquitous yellow bracelets, Lance was no bumper-sticker motivationalist. But he did say one thing that stuck with me: “We can take responsibility for ourselves and be brave.”

  It seemed like a powerful mantra, in sickness or sport. I gave it my own spin, of course. That doesn’t mean that if we win or lose, live or die, the credit or blame is all ours. The kind of cancer cells that ambushed Lance and me were vulnerable to a chemotherapy protocol that wouldn’t have helped if we’d had, say, pancreatic or lung cancer. You have to take charge of your health and goals, do the best you can, face what happens. Control what you can control. The rest is luck.

  The panel discussion at Stanford, “Athletes Winning the War Against Cancer,” went well. Armstrong was joined by Eric Davis, whose seventeen-year major-league baseball career had been briefly interrupted by colon cancer, and Tom Gullikson, the tennis player and coach, who had cared for his twin, Tim, before his death from brain cancer. I can’t remember when professional male athletes have offered themselves up so openly as having been frightened, vulnerable, and out of control of their lives. There were no sports questions from a crowd as raptly quiet as a symphony audience.

  Davis, Gullikson, and Armstrong, conditioned as male athletes to “suck it up” and play through pain, had waited longer than most male nonathletes, certainly longer than most women, to present their symptoms. Also, despite their celebrity, they all had their problems with patronizing and insensitive doctors. But typically, as athletes, once they submitted to a medical program they were model patients.

  “I approached cancer the way I would prepare for the Tour,” Armstrong said. “Get in shape. Find out as much as you can, be motivated by small results. The lesion shrinking a little gave me the same kind of encouragement to keep going that I would get when my uphill times get slightly faster.”

  On our way out of the arena, a woman stopped Armstrong and asked him how his belief in God had helped him as a cancer patient.

  “Everyone should believe in something,” he said in his direct, almost chilly way, “and I believed in surgery, chemotherapy, and my doctors.”

  The questioner looked disappointed, but I felt a surge of relief. Armstrong had held his ground. We had agreed that the intrusion of faith-based treatment can be pernicious, almost blaming the victim, and he had pointed out that “good, strong people get cancer and they do all the right things to beat it, and they still die.”

  As we left, Lance grinned at me. “I guess I won’t be able to go into politics when I stop bike racing.”

  I was charmed at the time, although after eight more years of Lance watching I wasn’t convinced he would ever stop bike racing or consider anything, including politics, closed to him. There is a steely, messianic aspect of Lance that never quits—against cancer, against competitors, and against the forces that seem determined to prove he used performance-enhancing drugs and bring him down, including French antidrug authorities, some of the media, rivals such as former Tour champions Greg LeMond and the disgraced Floyd Landis, and the Javert-like federal investigator, Jeff Novitzky, who has made a career of dogging athletes.

  I wish they would give it up, do something useful. I’m not sure if this is Bobbin, the fan, talking or Lippy, the scribe, or both of us in concert. The “war” on drugs was lost a long time ago, and you’d have to be a fool to go up the Pyrenees without a push.

  Chapter Sixteen

  The Lodge Brothers

  Scenes from the dawn and from the twilight.

  The feisty little tabloid columnist Jimmy Cannon, at a press conference in the early 1960s, is screaming “You’re blinding me! You’re blinding me!” as he kicks over the TV light stands. He believes he can delay the start of the New Sports Order. Less obviously, the Daily News baseball writer Dick Young is scurrying around the room unplugging the light-stand electrical cords.

  Nearly fifty years later, as endearingly quixotic, the Pulitzer Prize winner and Friday Night Lights author Buzz Bissinger is screaming at Will Leitch, the founder of the snarkish sports Web site Deadspin, that “blogs are dedicated to cruelty, dedicated to journalistic dishonesty,” which “pisses the shit out of me.” This is on HBO. Host Bob Costas, pretending it is not great TV, has his faintly disapproving schoolmarm face on.

  When I started on the path from Cannon’s kick to Bissinger’s rant, athletes still needed off-season jobs and access was easy. The biggest problem interviewing Joe Namath in the days leading up to Super Bowl III was pushing through the kids and old ladies who clustered around him at the hotel pool. That was another country.

  The price for that long-gone access was the promise of protection. Athletes could be sure that their binges, brawls, and bimbos would not
be reported. The covenant fractured as the economic and social gap between hack and jock widened, as the financial value of sports grew, as newspaper writers became obsolete as brokers between athletes and fans. TV freed athletes from needing print journalists to present them to the public, and most TV sports journalists (my bloggingheads.tv partner, the writer and editor Bryan Curtis, has called sportscasting “a halfway house for halfwits”) were thrilled to be part of the show on the industry’s terms. Athletes could also control their images through ads and paid appearances. Blogs and tweets and Facebook pages would give teams and athletes direct access to their fans. They could spin their own news. Mass media conferences are tightly controlled now. One-on-one interviews are negotiated with agents and public relations advisers. Sportswriting has become another department of celebrity journalism.

  As it should be. I may feel nostalgic about interviewing Namath at the pool or Casey Stengel at the bar, but those memories seem like tribal legends. Of the most famous athletes of this century, Michael Jordan and Tiger Woods, little was known beyond their performances for a very long time. Most reporters didn’t report, happy to be allowed to watch them and god them up. When Tiger’s facade of chilly control cracked in 2009, the media’s predictable response echoed back a century to Grantland Rice’s “Gee whiz” and W. O. McGeehan’s “Aw nuts.”

  The Neo Gee Whizzers declared for Tiger’s right to privacy; why he had fled from his Florida mansion at 2 A.M. with his wife in pursuit and crashed his Cadillac SUV into a nearby hydrant and tree, knocking himself out, was his business. All he owed us was continued greatness as a golfer. The Modern Aw Nutsies demanded a full disclosure; why was his wife holding a golf club, and was there any truth to the supermarket tabloid stories about his grand-slam philandering? Tiger is too important to us, they implied, not to clear the air and soothe our concerns. Speak to us now!